Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Rant rant rant rant rant! I just wasted all afternoon trying to make what I thought was a simple 2-line change to a program, because the stupid programmer used a stupid misfeature of the stupid Cobol language.

Who the hell was writing new apps in Cobol as late as 1999 anyway? The stupid contractors hired by my stupid company, that’s who. And they must have been supervised by a stupid project manager (probably one of my ex-bosses) who failed to ride herd on them and enforce sensible coding standards.

I shouldn’t even have to touch this program anyway. All support for the old apps is supposed to be frozen so that we have time to design, build, and test the new apps. But no! Our CEO came down with a sudden allergy to one of our business partners, so now this database has to be ripped apart with such unseemly haste that reminds me of the college freshman who’s worried about missing the last day of the going-out-of-business sale at the whorehouse.

Not only did my change have no effect whatsoever, but I couldn’t even figure out how the original version of the program could have possibly worked. After wrestling all afternoon with this grotesquely structured monstrosity, I finally learn that in Cobol you can write a statement like:

READ FILE INP-FILE NEXT RECORD INTO WS-WORK-RECORD.

and it not only moves the data into WS-WORK-RECORD but also into some totally different area named under the file description. And the cross reference doesn’t show that this other area is ever modified.

Jack Kenny, the creator of a recent short-lived television series called The Book of Daniel, wondered why his fellow gays and lesbians didn’t fight back when the American Family Association attacked him. They said that an openly gay man had no business writing a show that mentions Jesus and Christianity. He would have appreciated more articles in the gay press and unspecified forms of uproar and protest. He asks why gay and lesbian people don’t stand up for themselves more often.

Well, in this case I’m sure there are all the usual reasons – people didn’t hear about the controversy in time, they thought it was remote from their concerns, they thought someone else would respond. Isn’t that what the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is for?

In my case, I have a particular reason I didn’t bother to defend Mr. Kenny and his show. It’s merely a television program, and I don’t care.